In The Field Between Us

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This excerpt originally appeared in Blackbird

Read more from the book in the New York Times, diode poetry journal, and at LitHub and The Academy of American Poets website

Dear S—
Today I started walking where the trees were alive,
still stitched to their leaves, still humming, still houses
for musky warm and wild things who out-breathed all
the men and all their knives. And yes, the woods were dark,
but nothing ever happens once, and so they didn't stay
that way: the sun came up on the survivors
and there I was, somehow among their number, still 
dragging the same legs, still finding buckshot caught 
behind my tendons, braced for new machines  
I might hear readying to work on all my flesh.
S, it turns out we can last a long time with our legs
bent, make it for miles crawling on our hands. 
A callus forms, we grow a shell. In curling downward
it is easier to press our ears right to the ground,
hear that, beneath us both, where leaves and marrow
wear down and wear out, there's water running.
The woods, once, were something else. 

Dear M—
Today I forgot I went looking
for my own face, the shape
of something I should love.
I watched the leaves
gather around my feet,
their small dead selves lighter
now, unselved. Perhaps this is
part of it, this willingness
to forget the way the world
has touched our bodies sharply,
so we refill ourselves with
someone else: someone who
doesn’t start every time
she hears a distant saw, who doesn’t
feel her legs as deadwood, rot.
I want to be the kind of woman
who has one story and it’s a good one,
and it starts like this: once,
I was in the dark woods.
Here’s the version I know
instead: nothing ever happens
once. The woods are everywhere.
The woods are rife with men
and saws and knives.
The trees, once, were alive.

Dear S—
The birds our hands become 
are the ones with holes cut
in their cores so you can see
right through them to the world 
they're leaving toward: little globe 
of cloud, or rusted brush, or green held
steady there between their bones while 
they go on building and unbuilding
their homes from what was there already,
unspooling the string and tearing through
the air like they are not torn through, 
like what's a wound was always 
meant to be a window. I open my hands 
and watch them work until they're out of sight.
In one clearing, we settle down for a night 
with what the birds have left behind, 
in another, our hands make an aperture 
somebody sees the sky through.

Dear M—
Our faces are beyond recognition
and there are so many ways
I’ve failed to see myself
in the world, failed
to see the world in me,
though I’ve folded the woods
and the river into my arms, my chest,
so that I might be wrecked again,
so that I might be made
into another thing
the world forgets. I don’t think
we’ll ever recognize a place
as ours, as built for us, unless
it’s one we make from the ashes
of the-next-best-thing, a nest
that’s shaped by all the birds
before us. Even the raft
wasn’t made for us, but of us,
our bodies unable to carry
themselves but made to carry
everything else. When I open
my hands, I’m never surprised
by the birds they turn into, how
quick they are to take a thing
apart to see what holds it up.
Take a little string, some gauze,
a piece of bark. Whatever it is
we carry into each clearing,
let’s hold it up and squint
until it turns into a face we know,
a house we’ve loved, a wrecked
and empty nest, a place the birds
made for someone else,
then left.

Dear M—
If what’s a wound was always
meant to be a window, then say
my body’s shot with light: say
it’s me who looks, who
presses herself against the glassless
frame and waits for the riddled surfaces
to announce each version of the body
I’ve been, and the ones I think I’ll become:
my mother’s perfect face
that mine doesn’t resemble, the idea
of a child I can’t see, and so imagine
I might keep. Say it’s me who
does the mapping: I name the river
and every gnarled tree, the places
that they reach: say I see
the whole of me blanch dry and white.
Say home is a shard of bone I pull
from the riverbed, and say it’s me
who cracks the earth to put it back.
The map is wrong. Someone else
shoots me through with light,
an X-ray a map I’m told is clear
and true, someone else cracks me
open too, names the earth, says
what shard comes out, what each
becomes, which piece goes back.

Dear S—
At the bottom of the riverbed 
the ground is dry as all the shards
of bone we buried and unburied there.
I puzzle skeletons together from 
the bleached scraps we wrenched loose,
trying to make an animal of what
they left us with when it was over. 
I know I'm glowing from the artificial 
stars they pumped us bright with,
that the rivers in my wrists are running 
violet before they calcify. I'm leaking light.
I stain the things I touch. I lie down 
in what is just a canyon now, and 
watching from above, they use my
growing constellations to map out 
the world they've made: pin down 
the north, my waning water, what's
worth saving, how a good war spreads.